The Make It Right foundation has unveiled its new home designs for the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes of Fort Peck, Montana. Following LEED Platinum certification and Cradle to Cradle practices, the foundation is known for building sustainable homes for people in need. For the Ft. Peck project, Make... View full entry
"What's interesting is that when you go back a long time, they share a lot of architectural typologies. They are not so different...This is about going back to the origins when these three faiths were close and shared a lot architecturally". Kuehn says. — BBC News
Stephen Evans digs into the House of One, a planned synagogue, church and mosque under one roof. View full entry
Using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were captured with Google’s Street View camera technology, [the Google Cultural Institute's Street Art Project] includes street art from around the globe, including work that no longer exists [...]
Google is the latest organization to wade into debates about how or whether to institutionalize, let alone commercialize, art that is ephemeral and often willfully created subversively.
— nytimes.com
The first renderings are out for Tadao Ando's first project in New York City, 152 Elizabeth Street, a 32,000 sq.ft "ultra-luxury" condominium building to be constructed at the corner of Kenmare and Elizabeth Street in NoLIta in Manhattan. New York-based luxury residential development firm Sumaida... View full entry
A team of researchers from Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia are working on another solution: A swarm of tiny robots that could cover the construction site of the future, quickly and cheaply building greener buildings of any size. [...]
"The robots can work simultaneously while performing different tasks, and having a fixed size they can create objects of virtually any scale, as far as material properties permit”
— fastcoexist.com
Check out the Minibuilders in action below: View full entry
"I got to say Chicago I think this is on you. Did you not think Donald Trump was going to put his name on the building you let him build? It's what he does. Have you been to New York? Or, as you'd think it would be called from the buildings, 'New Trump City'" — Daily Show
Last night, John Stewart weighed in on the clash between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Donald Trump. View full entry
The London office of SOM and Copenhagen-based firm Entasis -- who collaborated with COWI in Denmark and Sweden -- was just announced as having the winning design for the Polestar Tower in Gothenburg, Sweden. Once built, the 230 m. structure will reportedly be Scandinavia's tallest tower. — bustler.net
Since our last update on the Gothenburg tower competition, five star-studded finalist teams submitted their proposals under anonymity. SOM and Entasis went against teams led by Zaha Hadid Architects, Ian Simpson Architects, Wingårdhs Arkitektkontor, and Manuelle Gautrand... View full entry
Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff. — psmag.com
Due to plummeting enrollment and a troubled district, vacant school buildings—heck, just vacant buildings—are none too rare in Detroit. After 19 years of abandonment, the Nellie Leland School, however, is no longer vacant—it, as abandoned urban buildings are want to do, is back in session as condos. [...]
Today, the school is known as Leland Lofts, a set of expansive condos in the Lafayette Park neighborhood near downtown Detroit, where a 1,465-square-foot, one-bedroom loft goes for $175K.
— curbed.com
Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]
The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range."
— la.curbed.com
The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".
The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.
— Al Jazeera
Reminds me of NYC in the 1980's when the city put large vinyl decals depicting shutters, potted plants, Venetian blinds and window shades over the yawning windows of abandoned city-owned buildings that face the Cross Bronx Expressway. View full entry
Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets. — archpaper.com
Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else. — theawl.com
THANKS TO preservation efforts and the museum-building boom of the past decade, America's hot zone for modern and contemporary architecture is still the Midwest. And driving is the best way to see it all, including the star attraction, Chicago. "It's the birthplace of tall buildings," said Zoë Ryan, an architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago — online.wsj.com
A $700,000 home was teetering over the edge of Texas' Lake Whitney — until officials set it on fire.
The home, which had been gradually crumbling into the lake for weeks, was set on fire shortly after 10 a.m. local time after authorities deemed it the safest and cheapest option. Officials had considered pulling the home closer to land using a giant net — deemed unsafe — or letting it fall into the lake on its own — too expensive to clean up.
— mashable.com